FLASH
Shkruar nga Michael Weiss & James Rushton
Moscow's intelligence services are recruiting innocent civilians, including young men and women, for suicide missions.
Shortly after 2 p.m. on Valentine's Day this year, a middle-aged woman wearing a red coat approached a group of Ukrainian soldiers standing in front of a cafe in the city of Mykolaiv.
The soldiers, who were just finishing their lunch break, were standing in a group chatting, and apparently didn't pay much attention to the woman who dropped the bag she was carrying on the ground. Within seconds, the bomb hidden inside the bag exploded, instantly killing her and 3 of the Ukrainian soldiers.
As first aid quickly arrived at the scene, a coordinated messaging campaign began across Russian media, including the state-run newspaper Izvestia. It was claimed that the explosion was the revenge of a mother devastated by the grief of losing her only son in the war, after he was forcibly mobilized by Ukrainian authorities.
The soldiers who were killed, the propaganda campaign added, were recruiters of new soldiers. As is the case with most Russian influence operations, none of what they were told was true. The soldiers killed did not work in any recruiting office. They were all members of the Ukrainian army’s demining corps.
The attacker, a 42-year-old mother from the town of Horishni Plavni in the Poltava region, had left her baby at a nearby dormitory when she set off on what turned out to be a suicide bombing mission. Recruited through the social media platform Telegram, which despite its Russian ownership is still widely used in Ukraine, she was unaware of her deadly payload.
Her contact, a Russian secret service agent, told her that he would deliver a large sum of money to a certain location. The bomb had been prepared by a group of teenagers, aged between 14 and 17, also from the Poltava region. They had built the device according to the instructions of their Russian trainers, and handed it over to the unsuspecting woman.
Russian intelligence tracked the woman until she reached her target location, then remotely detonated the package. Nearly a month later, on a March evening, two teenagers, one 15 and the other 17, were walking near the train station in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, in a part of western Ukraine that has largely been spared Russian attacks, when the improvised explosive devices they were carrying detonated.
The older of the two was killed instantly. His younger friend was hospitalized with serious injuries. The device they had with them, which they had assembled under the supervision of their Russian trainers, was equipped with GPS tracking and remote detonation, as was the case with the bomb in Mykolaiv.
As the two teenagers walked near their target, their Russian trainers, who had initially recruited them with the promise of earning "easy money" by building and delivering the bomb to the right location, had no idea that they would be part of the massacre.
These attacks are just the latest examples of a tactic, increasingly used by Russian secret services in Ukraine, that is reminiscent of the most horrific actions of militant groups: turning naive or desperate civilians into human weapons.
"These are similar tactics to Al Qaeda and ISIS. Now for the Russians, there are no limits to what they will do to their opponents ," says Ed Bogan, a former CIA officer with extensive experience on Russia and Islamic terrorist groups.
"Russian secret services consider such people as disposable assets, they never worry about them. Teenagers and young people are easier to recruit for such actions, because they consider what is required of them as a kind of game," a Ukrainian intelligence officer told New Lines.
This horrific tactic is so widespread that the SBU, Ukraine's internal security service, and the police have been visiting schools and lecturing Ukrainian students on the dangers of foreign recruitment under the slogan "Burn the FSB officer."
“How do you know they are trying to use you?” National Police spokeswoman Yulia Girdvilis recently asked a class of students in Kiev. “For example, a stranger writes to you on social media and offers you ‘easy money’ for performing a simple task. They make you understand that ‘it’s not scary, that nothing bad will happen’. Also, Russian agents can use threats or blackmail. And the tasks can be arson, photographing important objects, transmitting information or even terrorist attacks,” she emphasized.
Such attacks have occurred across Ukraine. On February 1, an unemployed 21-year-old from Zhytomyr planted an explosive device in a recruitment office in the western city of Rivne. His Russian trainers monitored him via a live broadcast from his mobile phone, then detonated his charge, killing him instantly.
Four days later, on February 5, a man delivered a package to a recruitment center in Kamianets-Podilskyi. As soon as he handed it to Ukrainian soldiers at the security checkpoint outside, it exploded, killing himself and injuring four others.
In one particularly horrific incident, a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Ternopil was contacted on Telegram by Russian recruiters offering her money. After initial contact was made and the student refused to follow through, Russian agents hacked her phone to force her to cooperate, threatening to publish her intimate photos online.
She complied, built an improvised explosive device according to the instructions and tried to leave it near a local police station, but was stopped in time by Ukrainian security services. “It’s a very evil and insidious tactic, but unfortunately very effective,” Liubov Tsybulska, a Ukrainian expert on Russian hybrid warfare, told New Lines, comparing the methods to those used by violent Islamist groups attacking the West.
Ukrainian authorities believe that the choice of targets - military facilities and recruitment centers - is partly aimed at exploiting existing tensions in wartime Ukraine,
where military recruiters often face heavy criticism, even from patriotic Ukrainians, for their harsh approaches to ensuring the recruitment of men of the designated age.
Under military law, Ukrainian men aged 18-60 are considered eligible for military service and are prohibited from leaving the country, while those between 25 and 60 are actively subject to mobilization. But Moscow’s efforts to deepen existing tensions in society through active measures promoted by Telegram are not limited to Ukraine.
In Britain, Telegram channels linked to Russia have attempted to incite arson attacks on mosques and the writing of racist slogans in public places. Such attacks were rewarded with cryptocurrency. The British government is taking such threats seriously.
The head of MI5, Ken McCall, warned in October 2024 that the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, was on a mission to cause “continued chaos on British and European roads”.
Since Russia's full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian secret services and their various proxies have caused at least 59 incidents, ranging from attempted assassinations, cyberattacks, arson, or acts of vandalism, especially in places where materials destined for Ukraine are produced or stockpiled.
Given the situation, a nationwide campaign is being conducted in schools by the Security Service of Ukraine, warning children about the danger of such acts by Russians, urging them to report any such approaches to the Ukrainian authorities./ Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "New Lines Magazine"
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